Physica (http://physica.sourceforge.net) is a very simple casual platformer game where the goal is to drive a square through game levels from its starting position to his goal, avoiding hazards and without falling down.You can find Windows binaries on Sourceforge here, and source code together with build instructions on our Github repository

The 1.0 release includes 16 levels, plus a level editor to make your own ones; that (and feedback of course) is what I mainly need at the moment, since my level design skills are veeeery little. So if you want to have a try with the level editor, you're welcome to create and share.

Yes, the extension is 'stolen' from Battle for Wesnoth engine, which later got into the Frogatto engine, AFAIK... I did like the .cfg extension for somewhat aestethic reasons...

Anyway, I've recently updated to 1.1 version (same links as first post), which includes many fixes (one in particular which dramatically increases fps) as well as achievements support (only 8 achievements for now - as I said my design and content creation skills are very low )

I do cap fps at 60... The fps text on the upper right corner shows the maximum fps that the computer can run in that moment... That is: if higher than 60, the game will run at 60fps; else, the game will run at the fps shown in that label - and that should not happen, hopefully.

About key settings, I think I'm gonna work on them in the next few days... It shouldn't be difficult, and it is needed for those users who have a different keyboard configuration, I guess...

In case anyone else was worrying about this: I also noticed a bug which I had missed before - loading level selection screen and achievements screen causes a lot of unused memory to be kept and after a few trials the game slows down and eventually crashes... I do know how to solve that, and I'm gonna fix it as soon as I get a free moment.

Key settings now available: open the settings panel and you will find three new buttons for controls. Click on one of them and then press a key to change it.I also fixed the memory-eating bug I was talking before.

I'm now going to work on adding some kind of tutorial levels and making the existing ones more 'playable' and better progressive, as charlie suggested.

Buch {l Wrote}:Hey folks out there! Has anyone finished the first pack's levels? For a couple of friends of mine think that those are much too difficult, and I'd like to know if anyone else thinks the same...

I've finished the first pack's levels , with number of retries over 300 in some levels

Just a quick heads-up about game development: I added support for multiple level sets, and did a general level restyling to remove that 'box' feeling most levels had before... As far as I can see, some levels also became easier after changes.

Briefly, there are only 3 errors: The first one is 'deque<object>' in 'object' class, incompatible with MSVC2008 STL, the compiler complains about unknown size of 'object' class, which I think that it must be a bug in MSVC STL implementation The second one is that MSVC doesn't support fancy structure initializer, like 'color = {255,255,255};' and 'SDL_SetClipRect (target, & SDL_Rect { rect.x + ..., blah blah blah...' The third one is the compiler complains about unknown function overload of 'floor' and other floating-point processing function, in fact your code 'floor((c.r % 1000) / 100)' is wrong because '(c.r % 1000) / 100' is already an integer

The first error is due to having two classes known as 'object' - the first one defined by MSVC library (the base object class, from which all the others are derived, if I remember correctly), the second one defined by me in the Bulk_script.h header. I might consider a refactoring...

The second error would likely be solved replacing those initializations with correct initializations, that shouldn't be much of a problem.

Coming to the third one, I wrote that code piece a couple of years ago and don't remember exactly why I did so... It is inside a function that converts a SDL_Color structure into a string with rrrgggbbb format, though it does so digit by digit... Actually, it doesn't make much sense It will be fixed with my next commit to the repo.

Buch {l Wrote}:The first error is due to having two classes known as 'object' - the first one defined by MSVC library (the base object class, from which all the others are derived, if I remember correctly), the second one defined by me in the Bulk_script.h header. I might consider a refactoring...

I think I got the point. But are you sure the list doesn't cause the same problem? Also, changing the declaration only would not be enough... I'd have to change many parts of the code too, and I think I'm gonna solve this later in development. The best solution would likely be

The 1.2 version is out - this basically add a level pack editor and an automatic update system (still in development).It doesn't include any new level pack yet, but once a new content update is released the game will notify you, and if you want it will download and install it.

I'm still looking for level editors, so if anyone wants to help just contact me...

Check out the website (physica.sourceforge.net) to get the latest release!Still looking for level makers - and also for translators now... So drop me a line if you're interested in helping. Thanks in advance!

Please report any bugs you find here in the forum.

Important note about performance:to make graphics look smoother (solve tearing problems basically) I had to turn on double buffering, which might (and probably will) slow down the game a little bit. If you're experiencing lagging, try disabling that through the corresponding option in the settings panel (this will cause little tearing anyway ). If you're still experiencing lagging (hopefully you aren't ) try disabling fullscreen. Sorry men, but SDL doesn't give that much performance on high resolutions...

Still, I hadn't thought of adding support for different fonts... that is: at the moment, themes (which control which font will be used) are locale-independent... That's something I hadn't thought of (my fault )...

So, the first solution could be creating an alternative version modifying themes with the right font - the second, which I'd prefer, would be implementing themes variations for different locales... I don't think that should be difficult, if you're a bit patient... It might take no longer than one or two days, I think...

[EDIT] I think I've fixed it... It should be possible now. And I think Droid Sans will work pretty fine - it looks quite neat. And one more question: have you experienced lagging/low fps?

Buch {l Wrote}:So, the first solution could be creating an alternative version modifying themes with the right font - the second, which I'd prefer, would be implementing themes variations for different locales... I don't think that should be difficult, if you're a bit patient... It might take no longer than one or two days, I think...

Sure

Buch {l Wrote}:And one more question: have you experienced lagging/low fps?

Not really Maybe there are performance issue for SDL and SDL_gfx... In the case of Me and My Shadow, the game runs slowly on old computers, but SuperTux doesn't, maybe SDL is not hardware-accelerated (SuperTux uses OpenGL) and your game has a lot of vector graphics, and SDL_gfx is 100% not hardware-accelerated FYI: In my new projects I'll use SFML (2.0 nightly, not 1.6) instead of any version of SDL, including 1.2.x, 1.3, 2.0

Thank you for answering... And I know SDL is not accelerated, though it is much easier to learn and use than OpenGL (which I can't use yet) - it was a known limitation...

Anyway, I added locale-specific themes support right now and added information about them in the wiki page about translations - although I haven't tested this feature yet, it shouldn't create any problem for it's quite straightforward...